Hmmm. Maybe being a Mac user makes me biased on this, but I reckon that computer users (of all kinds) should be able to flick a switch and just have it work. They shouldn't have to educate themselves about viruses and other malware. They shouldn't need to be concerned about security and other issues. After all, I don't need to read up on emission spectra and the effect of induction on power phase lag just to fit a light bulb or press a light switch; neither should I need to learn lots about computer security just to use a few applications. In short, we shouldn't be having this conversation!
The fact that we are having this conversation seems to mean that we as software developers aren't doing our jobs properly. We should be writing secure systems, making sure that nothing we do could possibly be a point of entry for malware of any kind. This particularly means the folks at MS, of course, but even app writers need to be vigilant.
But we're not living in that ideal world; we're living in the real one, where the most popular platform has innumerable insecurities in its OS and popular apps... So I guess you're right: we do need to make users aware of these things. It just annoys me, because we shouldn't need to!
I think it would make more sense to make each denomination a different base color entirely
A couple of decades ago, UK currency was like that: the £1 was dark green, the £5 dark blue, and so on. When they introduced new notes a decade or so back, they used more colours on each note, which made them much harder to distinguish. ISTR being told that this was partly to make them harder to copy, but also a deliberate measure so that people would have to look closer at them, and hopefully spot counterfeit ones a little more often...
OTOH, different denominations are slightly different sizes, which helps.
Nice idea, but I'm not sure it'd pan out in practice.
What if MS releases an incompatible variant, or resurrects VJ++, and advertises it as 'Runs Java(TM) Programs!'? After a while, the fact that it isn't called 'Java' itself won't register with people, the brand will have been successfully diluted, and compatibility will have gone out of the window.
I doubt that would be a good commercial decision; I also suspect that it would leave many disappointed.
The Hobbit is an excellent children's story, but it is a children's story. Compared to LoTR, the characters are thin, the plot episodic, and the background underdeveloped. It doesn't have the wealth of historical detail, the layers of meaning and significance, the depth of character, the grand themes of loss of innocence, betrayal, loyalty, corruption, redemption, evil, fate, epic struggle, and so on.
I don't doubt that they could make a very entertaining film (though I suspect that many of the episodes would need to be shortened or cut, and it would probably need further closure added in the form of foreshadowings and other references). Had LoTR not been filmed, it would probably have been reasonably successful, too. But LoTR is such a grander work that people will inevitably have false expectations of a prequel, and so it'd be bound to disappoint many.
FWIW, the paperbacks I read were green, then blue, then tan. And that was a very old Allen & Unwin copy. Probably not a first edition, but I doubt many of the other paperbacks being waved hereabouts predate it.
It was. Music by Andrew Lloyd Webber (no hyphen), words by Richard Stilgoe.
Apparently, it was originally conceived in 1973 as an animated TV series... And since closing in the West End (London) after nearly 7,500 performances, rumour has it that an animated TV series might still be in the offing!
Cost isn't why reverse firewalls will never be popular. Self-interest is.
Gone are the days when most viruses would do catastrophic things like wiping your hard drive. Back then, you'd really regret getting infected, so you'd take real care not to let it happen. Now, though, it simply slows down your machine a bit, slows down your net connection, that sort of thing*. And people can't be bothered to stop that. What does it matter to them that their irresponsibility might lead to thousands of other people suffering infection? If it doesn't hurt them too much, they won't take even simple protection measures.
And it's the same with firewalls. Some people won't bother at all -- they don't really understand just how much risk there, and what they could lose. Luckily, many now realise, and have some form of inbound firewall. But many of those will baulk at the idea of spending more time and/or money on something that won't do them any good.
(* I'm only guessing here. I've never owned a PC, so viruses are not a problem I've had to deal with. FWIW, this Mac is not only behind an ADSL router, but is running ipfw which I've configured quite tightly.)
Many words had various spellings in the 1600s when English was brought to America... we simply chose one of the accepted spellings at the time and the Brits chose the other.
Actually, I think that most of the differences between US and UK English are words which have changed in British English over the last few centuries, and US English still has the older form. (Most of the few cases where US English has changed are due to Noah Webster.)
I find it interesting that British English seems to be a fraction more precise. For example, it distinguishes:
a measuring device ('meter') from the unit of length ('metre');
the side of a road ('kerb') from restraint ('curb');
a floor of a building ('storey') from a tale ('story');
a test or restraint ('check') from an order to pay ('cheque') and a V-shaped mark ('tick');
grow weary ('tire') from a wheel rim ('tyre');
a rough version ('draft') from a movement of fluid ('draught');
some verbs from nouns: license/licence, practise/practice, and prophesy/prophecy; and more recently,
a computer storage medium ('disk') from any other round flat object ('disc'); and
computer instructions ('program') from a broadcast or list of events ('programme').
But I don't know of any cases the other way around, where US English makes a distinction that British English doesn't.
(I know a little about this, as I've written a tool to convert text from US to British English. Cases like those are tiresome and need user intervention to distinguish.)
The most confusing cases are words which are current in both languages, but with different meanings. 'Pavement', for example, means a pedestrian path at the side of a road here in the UK (US 'sidewalk'), but the surface of the road itself in the US (UK 'road', 'tarmac', 'asphalt' &c). 'Pants' and 'suspenders' are also ripe with hilarious possibilities!
Oh, and as I discovered a few years ago, what we call 'tea', you call 'hot tea'. I was extremely non-plussed the first couple of times I asked for tea and got something cold and sugary with lemon! Anyone who prefers that strange concoction should see this H2G2 article...
Actually most English words have Greek and Latin descent.
Depends how you count them. Just over a quarter are from French, a similar amount from Latin, a quarter Germanic (from Middle English, Old English, Old Norse, and Dutch), and the rest from Greek, proper names, and elsewhere.
However, those words aren't spread evenly. The 'core' vocabulary is mostly Germanic -- the short, simple, blunt, everyday words. Prepositions, conjunctions, pronouns, demonstratives, and lots of concrete nouns and physical verbs are all Germanic in origin. Much of the Latinate vocabulary is stuck in technical, professional, and formal contexts.
Anyway, siskbc was right about that.
(More at Wikipedia, of course. There's a good short history, highlighting the difference between Latinate and Germanic branches, here.)
Is it US-centric, or is it broadly applicable elsewhere too?
Is there a version in a more usable form than PDF? E.g. an HTML- or plain-text-based format that's comfortable to read on my PDA? (If so, it'd probably be much smaller and help your server to hold up.)
I've worked out their plan. They're hoping that their legal team performs so badly that they can then ask for a mistrial, and spin it out even longer that way...
I can't help feeling that people have a rosy-tinted view of Eps.4 & 5.
After all, most of the things that people complain about in the more recent movies are there too. Ep.4 has it's incredibly annoying, 'cute', kiddy-friendly characters -- they're just in droid form rather than furry. It also has ludicrous-looking and cuddly aliens (in the cantina, on the chess board, &c) and droids (in the transport, on the Death Star), impressive but pointless action sequences, and so on and so forth. Ep.5 has all these too -- in fact, its cute character is not only one of the stars of the film, but a silly voice and irritating dialect he has, to boot! And of course they were the movies that invented the concept of merchandising and tie-ins.
I'm not saying that they're as bad as the more recent ones, just that they seem to be a lot closer than you'd think from reading comments around these parts!
Actually, if you want my opinion on what made Ep.1 worse than the older movies (I haven't seen Ep.2 yet), it wasn't any of the annoying characters, it was simply this: lack of focus. One of the things that made Eps.4-6 so successful (artistically as well as commercially) was their simplicity: they concentrated on a few characters and situations, and most of the background and backstory was implied; this gave meaning to the visuals, depth to the characters, and power to the drama. Whereas Ep.1 seemed determined to show us so much backstory and background that it appeared fragmented and obscure, its characters shallow and its situations confused.
Drawing this comparison makes me cringe, but in that one respect alone the series isn't too different from LoTR. The basic plot of LoTR is actually fairly simple for its scope, and it concentrates on a few characters. There's an unprecedented amount of background and backstory, of course, which is what makes it so special; but again, that's mostly implied rather than shown. This keeps the storyline simple and the drama strong, while rewarding rereading and study. Where Tolkien actually presented some of that backstory, in the Silmarillion, he was arguably less successful.
Anyway, getting back to the point, people don't always understand the effect of their expectations. When the first movie came out, there was probably a bit of hype, but people didn't expect a lot: just another pleasantly diverting sci-fi flick. Consequently, they were generally very impressed. But as people saw more of the films, got to enjoy them and had more invested in them emotionally -- and as people grew up and their tastes became more sophisticated, and they forgot just how little it took to impress them when they were young -- their expectations got higher and higher. I expect that many of Ep.1's viewers wouldn't have been satisfied unless it had been not just as good as Ep.4, but phenomenally better.
In short: while I agree that Ep. 1's not as good as Eps.4 & 5, I think that it's not the pile of excrement, and they're not the masterpieces, that people seem to assume.
Hollywood has produced a few great science fiction movies; it's just that they're not called science fiction, and don't come with the usual science fiction trappings. For example, I consider 'The Truman Show' to be SF, along with 'Being John Malkovich'. 'Cube' is verging on SF/horror. And I'm sure you can think of more examples.
I agree about most of the standard Hollywood 'SF' fare, though. What's even worse is when films seem all geared up to address the really big ideas and questions, and then chicken out and just do something clichéd and tired. 'Minority Report' is one of the big offenders here, along with 'Matrix Revolutions', but again, there are umpteen other examples...
the implementation is allowed to do anything with it - including shutting the errant program down with no further damage.
True. But in practice, that sort of thing doesn't happen.
Yes, C/C++ compilers are free to do all sorts of bounds checking and other defensive measures and safeguards. But those take time. People generally use C and C++ mainly because they're fast, so in production code they disable those sorts of features to get the best performance.
The lack of bounds checking might not be a criticism of the language per se but it's certainly a criticism of the language as it's used.
They must have a lot of money to burn if they can turn away 10% of their revenue just for the sake of fixing a few (or no) broken pages.
It's probably not about fixing a few broken pages -- it's about testing, and about certifying.
I'm not in the industry, but maybe this scenario isn't too far off the mark in some cases. Suppose you run a web design company, and you're an MS shop. You've knocked up loads of web sites that run on IE, and you've got it down to a fine art. Suppose someone asks you for quotes for IE and for multi-browser. What do you say? You say that multi-browser is likely to cost a lot more. Not necessarily because there's much more coding to do, but because your testing goes from one browser on one platform to umpteen of each, in all the umpty-ump combinations (which may well involve buying and setting up those different platforms and browsers), and you then have to work out how to fix any problems (which may mean gaining or buying in expertise). So of course, for an apparent 10% of visitors, most companies won't stump up a lot more dosh. And so all the web sites, and the web design companies, do things cheaply and only certify their sites on IE/Windows -- whether or not they actually work on other sites.
It's not conspiracy, just self-interest.
If that's so, then what it'll take is one major web design company acquiring the expertise and equipment needed to be able to offer and certify multi-browser sites at the same price (either off their own bat, or from a commission from an enlightened client); then maybe clients and other design companies will follow. But until then...
BTW, for me the great thing about this story isn't the large figure for FireFox. Not that I've anything against it; it's a great browser, and I'm pleased it's doing well. But more important than that is the low figure for IE. The less of a monoculture the web is, the more everyone benefits: FireFox and their users, Camino and the other Gecko-based browsers and their users, Safari and its, Opera, OmniWeb, even Lynx. And, indirectly, IE and its users! The only people who gain from an IE monoculture are MS themselves, and I'm quite happy at the prospect of them having to compete on merit for a change.
To be fair, their Mac player behaves very well indeed -- it doesn't grab any file associations you don't want it to, it doesn't do anything on startup, it doesn't connect to Real unless you tell it to, it's easy to configure, install, and uninstall. It's a well-behaved Mac app, in other words.
Obviously, this is rather different from some of the Windows versions, but not everything they do deserves to be smeared.
Actually, both '-ise' and '-ize' forms are current in UK English, though '-ise' is more common. Which you use is a matter of style; IIRC, traditionally the Cambridge press traditionally preferred '-ise', and Oxford press '-ize'. Personally, I much prefer the former, just coz it's not what you Yanks use:)
As you say, it seems to have been forgotten, especially by the US, but the real meaning of 'terrorist' is someone who uses violence to achieve a political end; who favours intimidating methods of coercing a government or community.
By that definition, a man walking into a restaurant with an Uzi and shooting everyone inside for no good reason is not a terrorist. A man walking into a restaurant with an Uzi and threatening to shoot everyone inside unless he's given a million pounds is not a terrorist. A man walking into a restaurant with an Uzi and threatening to shoot everyone inside unless the US pulls all its troops out of Iraq is a terrorist.
Of course, 'political' need not be concerned with international military policy; it could be anything from demanding better wages for employees of BigEvilCorp, to protesting about planning regulations in LittleTown. But it usually takes some basic level of lucidity and intent, so the 'lone madman' probably doesn't count.
If England hadn't tried to appease the Nazi's in 1938 there probably wouldn't have been a World War II.
...and we'd now be under German rule.
That 'appeasement' gave the UK time to prepare for a war that many saw as inevitable. In 1938 we were in no state to fight a major war. History seems divided on Chamberlain's motives, but he gave us the breathing space we needed to rearm.
Slashdot Mirror
As DNA put it, "People who can supply that amount of fire power don't need to supply verbs as well."
The fact that we are having this conversation seems to mean that we as software developers aren't doing our jobs properly. We should be writing secure systems, making sure that nothing we do could possibly be a point of entry for malware of any kind. This particularly means the folks at MS, of course, but even app writers need to be vigilant.
But we're not living in that ideal world; we're living in the real one, where the most popular platform has innumerable insecurities in its OS and popular apps... So I guess you're right: we do need to make users aware of these things. It just annoys me, because we shouldn't need to!
A couple of decades ago, UK currency was like that: the £1 was dark green, the £5 dark blue, and so on. When they introduced new notes a decade or so back, they used more colours on each note, which made them much harder to distinguish. ISTR being told that this was partly to make them harder to copy, but also a deliberate measure so that people would have to look closer at them, and hopefully spot counterfeit ones a little more often...
OTOH, different denominations are slightly different sizes, which helps.
What if MS releases an incompatible variant, or resurrects VJ++, and advertises it as 'Runs Java(TM) Programs!'? After a while, the fact that it isn't called 'Java' itself won't register with people, the brand will have been successfully diluted, and compatibility will have gone out of the window.
Or is this an over-pessimistic scenario?
s/stupid/ignorant/. There's rather a difference between the two.
The Hobbit is an excellent children's story, but it is a children's story. Compared to LoTR, the characters are thin, the plot episodic, and the background underdeveloped. It doesn't have the wealth of historical detail, the layers of meaning and significance, the depth of character, the grand themes of loss of innocence, betrayal, loyalty, corruption, redemption, evil, fate, epic struggle, and so on.
I don't doubt that they could make a very entertaining film (though I suspect that many of the episodes would need to be shortened or cut, and it would probably need further closure added in the form of foreshadowings and other references). Had LoTR not been filmed, it would probably have been reasonably successful, too. But LoTR is such a grander work that people will inevitably have false expectations of a prequel, and so it'd be bound to disappoint many.
Not that either are conclusive, of course...
Ah. That answers my question of why they haven't released the new version in Infocom format, then!
I prefer the original. At least I can play that on the train on my Psion.
Apparently, it was originally conceived in 1973 as an animated TV series... And since closing in the West End (London) after nearly 7,500 performances, rumour has it that an animated TV series might still be in the offing!
What do you think /System/Library/CoreServices/Classic Startup.app is doing?
Gone are the days when most viruses would do catastrophic things like wiping your hard drive. Back then, you'd really regret getting infected, so you'd take real care not to let it happen. Now, though, it simply slows down your machine a bit, slows down your net connection, that sort of thing*. And people can't be bothered to stop that. What does it matter to them that their irresponsibility might lead to thousands of other people suffering infection? If it doesn't hurt them too much, they won't take even simple protection measures.
And it's the same with firewalls. Some people won't bother at all -- they don't really understand just how much risk there, and what they could lose. Luckily, many now realise, and have some form of inbound firewall. But many of those will baulk at the idea of spending more time and/or money on something that won't do them any good.
(* I'm only guessing here. I've never owned a PC, so viruses are not a problem I've had to deal with. FWIW, this Mac is not only behind an ADSL router, but is running ipfw which I've configured quite tightly.)
Actually, I think that most of the differences between US and UK English are words which have changed in British English over the last few centuries, and US English still has the older form. (Most of the few cases where US English has changed are due to Noah Webster.)
I find it interesting that British English seems to be a fraction more precise. For example, it distinguishes:
- a measuring device ('meter') from the unit of length ('metre');
- the side of a road ('kerb') from restraint ('curb');
- a floor of a building ('storey') from a tale ('story');
- a test or restraint ('check') from an order to pay ('cheque') and a V-shaped mark ('tick');
- grow weary ('tire') from a wheel rim ('tyre');
- a rough version ('draft') from a movement of fluid ('draught');
- some verbs from nouns: license/licence, practise/practice, and prophesy/prophecy; and more recently,
- a computer storage medium ('disk') from any other round flat object ('disc'); and
- computer instructions ('program') from a broadcast or list of events ('programme').
But I don't know of any cases the other way around, where US English makes a distinction that British English doesn't.(I know a little about this, as I've written a tool to convert text from US to British English. Cases like those are tiresome and need user intervention to distinguish.)
The most confusing cases are words which are current in both languages, but with different meanings. 'Pavement', for example, means a pedestrian path at the side of a road here in the UK (US 'sidewalk'), but the surface of the road itself in the US (UK 'road', 'tarmac', 'asphalt' &c). 'Pants' and 'suspenders' are also ripe with hilarious possibilities!
Oh, and as I discovered a few years ago, what we call 'tea', you call 'hot tea'. I was extremely non-plussed the first couple of times I asked for tea and got something cold and sugary with lemon! Anyone who prefers that strange concoction should see this H2G2 article...
Depends how you count them. Just over a quarter are from French, a similar amount from Latin, a quarter Germanic (from Middle English, Old English, Old Norse, and Dutch), and the rest from Greek, proper names, and elsewhere.
However, those words aren't spread evenly. The 'core' vocabulary is mostly Germanic -- the short, simple, blunt, everyday words. Prepositions, conjunctions, pronouns, demonstratives, and lots of concrete nouns and physical verbs are all Germanic in origin. Much of the Latinate vocabulary is stuck in technical, professional, and formal contexts.
Anyway, siskbc was right about that.
(More at Wikipedia, of course. There's a good short history, highlighting the difference between Latinate and Germanic branches, here.)
I've worked out their plan. They're hoping that their legal team performs so badly that they can then ask for a mistrial, and spin it out even longer that way...
After all, most of the things that people complain about in the more recent movies are there too. Ep.4 has it's incredibly annoying, 'cute', kiddy-friendly characters -- they're just in droid form rather than furry. It also has ludicrous-looking and cuddly aliens (in the cantina, on the chess board, &c) and droids (in the transport, on the Death Star), impressive but pointless action sequences, and so on and so forth. Ep.5 has all these too -- in fact, its cute character is not only one of the stars of the film, but a silly voice and irritating dialect he has, to boot! And of course they were the movies that invented the concept of merchandising and tie-ins.
I'm not saying that they're as bad as the more recent ones, just that they seem to be a lot closer than you'd think from reading comments around these parts!
Actually, if you want my opinion on what made Ep.1 worse than the older movies (I haven't seen Ep.2 yet), it wasn't any of the annoying characters, it was simply this: lack of focus. One of the things that made Eps.4-6 so successful (artistically as well as commercially) was their simplicity: they concentrated on a few characters and situations, and most of the background and backstory was implied; this gave meaning to the visuals, depth to the characters, and power to the drama. Whereas Ep.1 seemed determined to show us so much backstory and background that it appeared fragmented and obscure, its characters shallow and its situations confused.
Drawing this comparison makes me cringe, but in that one respect alone the series isn't too different from LoTR. The basic plot of LoTR is actually fairly simple for its scope, and it concentrates on a few characters. There's an unprecedented amount of background and backstory, of course, which is what makes it so special; but again, that's mostly implied rather than shown. This keeps the storyline simple and the drama strong, while rewarding rereading and study. Where Tolkien actually presented some of that backstory, in the Silmarillion, he was arguably less successful.
Anyway, getting back to the point, people don't always understand the effect of their expectations. When the first movie came out, there was probably a bit of hype, but people didn't expect a lot: just another pleasantly diverting sci-fi flick. Consequently, they were generally very impressed. But as people saw more of the films, got to enjoy them and had more invested in them emotionally -- and as people grew up and their tastes became more sophisticated, and they forgot just how little it took to impress them when they were young -- their expectations got higher and higher. I expect that many of Ep.1's viewers wouldn't have been satisfied unless it had been not just as good as Ep.4, but phenomenally better.
In short: while I agree that Ep. 1's not as good as Eps.4 & 5, I think that it's not the pile of excrement, and they're not the masterpieces, that people seem to assume.
I agree about most of the standard Hollywood 'SF' fare, though. What's even worse is when films seem all geared up to address the really big ideas and questions, and then chicken out and just do something clichéd and tired. 'Minority Report' is one of the big offenders here, along with 'Matrix Revolutions', but again, there are umpteen other examples...
True. But in practice, that sort of thing doesn't happen.
Yes, C/C++ compilers are free to do all sorts of bounds checking and other defensive measures and safeguards. But those take time. People generally use C and C++ mainly because they're fast, so in production code they disable those sorts of features to get the best performance.
The lack of bounds checking might not be a criticism of the language per se but it's certainly a criticism of the language as it's used.
It's probably not about fixing a few broken pages -- it's about testing, and about certifying.
I'm not in the industry, but maybe this scenario isn't too far off the mark in some cases. Suppose you run a web design company, and you're an MS shop. You've knocked up loads of web sites that run on IE, and you've got it down to a fine art. Suppose someone asks you for quotes for IE and for multi-browser. What do you say? You say that multi-browser is likely to cost a lot more. Not necessarily because there's much more coding to do, but because your testing goes from one browser on one platform to umpteen of each, in all the umpty-ump combinations (which may well involve buying and setting up those different platforms and browsers), and you then have to work out how to fix any problems (which may mean gaining or buying in expertise). So of course, for an apparent 10% of visitors, most companies won't stump up a lot more dosh. And so all the web sites, and the web design companies, do things cheaply and only certify their sites on IE/Windows -- whether or not they actually work on other sites.
It's not conspiracy, just self-interest.
If that's so, then what it'll take is one major web design company acquiring the expertise and equipment needed to be able to offer and certify multi-browser sites at the same price (either off their own bat, or from a commission from an enlightened client); then maybe clients and other design companies will follow. But until then...
BTW, for me the great thing about this story isn't the large figure for FireFox. Not that I've anything against it; it's a great browser, and I'm pleased it's doing well. But more important than that is the low figure for IE. The less of a monoculture the web is, the more everyone benefits: FireFox and their users, Camino and the other Gecko-based browsers and their users, Safari and its, Opera, OmniWeb, even Lynx. And, indirectly, IE and its users! The only people who gain from an IE monoculture are MS themselves, and I'm quite happy at the prospect of them having to compete on merit for a change.
Obviously, this is rather different from some of the Windows versions, but not everything they do deserves to be smeared.
No they don't. The crises have always been there, it's just that your memory is faulty. Remember, WE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN AT WAR WITH EASTASIA.
Actually, both '-ise' and '-ize' forms are current in UK English, though '-ise' is more common. Which you use is a matter of style; IIRC, traditionally the Cambridge press traditionally preferred '-ise', and Oxford press '-ize'. Personally, I much prefer the former, just coz it's not what you Yanks use :)
As you say, it seems to have been forgotten, especially by the US, but the real meaning of 'terrorist' is someone who uses violence to achieve a political end; who favours intimidating methods of coercing a government or community.
By that definition, a man walking into a restaurant with an Uzi and shooting everyone inside for no good reason is not a terrorist. A man walking into a restaurant with an Uzi and threatening to shoot everyone inside unless he's given a million pounds is not a terrorist. A man walking into a restaurant with an Uzi and threatening to shoot everyone inside unless the US pulls all its troops out of Iraq is a terrorist.
Of course, 'political' need not be concerned with international military policy; it could be anything from demanding better wages for employees of BigEvilCorp, to protesting about planning regulations in LittleTown. But it usually takes some basic level of lucidity and intent, so the 'lone madman' probably doesn't count.
I was with you right up as far as 'Good'...
That 'appeasement' gave the UK time to prepare for a war that many saw as inevitable. In 1938 we were in no state to fight a major war. History seems divided on Chamberlain's motives, but he gave us the breathing space we needed to rearm.